Waterless Palm Sunday: 4 Metro areas go without water

After going through almost 18 hours without electricity last Saturday, households and business establishments in Quezon City, Caloocan City, Novaliches and Malabon went waterless the whole of Palm Sunday, starting at dawn.

The reason given by the Lopez-owned Maynilad Water Services Inc. was that the Bagbag reservoir was almost empty because of the previous day’s power blackout that hit the entire Luzon grid of the National Power Corp.

The water situation, however, was not considered serious enough by the Lopez company to institute water rationing in its service area, making residents – who were all caught by surprise at dawn – suffer the whole day without water.

With Sunday being usually when most households do their laundry and cook meals for the week, thousands of families were greatly inconvenienced on finding their taps dry. Aggravating their situation and distress were the phones at the call center of Maynilad (1626) which were always busy.

Residents were indignant since there was no previous announcement of any interruption in water services.

Despite appeals made by residents, including this writer, for water tankers to be deployed in their areas, the receptionists at the call center only stated that there was no need for rationing since the problem was expected to be resolved in the evening.

Maynilad services the west zone of Metro Manila while its counterpart, the Manila Water Co., operates the east zone.

Maynilad said the Bagbag reservoir in Novaliches had reached a very critical water level of 63.5 meters, when operational level is 67 meters and is expected to worsen as the summer progresses.

Maynilad and Manila Water get 75 percent of their supply from the Angat reservoir owned by the National Power Corp. and from there, the water flows to Ipo Dam in Bulacan and then to La Mesa Dam in Quezon City.

Maynilad’s supply of water then goes to its treatment plant, near La Mesa, and then to the Bagbag reservoir for distribution to the west zone. In contrast, the supply of Manila Water comes from the Angat River, then to Ipo then to La Mesa and directly to the La Mesa filtration plant in Balara and then to the consumers.

As of yesterday, the water level at Angat Dam had dropped to 199.8 meters (much less than its normal service level of 271 meters) while Ipo had dropped to 98.6 meters (from a comfortable level of 100 meters) and La Mesa’s had gone down to 73 meters (from a comfortable level of 80 meters).

Both concessionaries are appealing to Metro Manilans to conserve water so that the current levels of the dams will not be depleted further by misuse of scarce water resource.

Because of Saturday’s 18-hour blackout, pumps could not fill the Bagbag reservoir with water from the Ipo and La Mesa dams to shore up its elevation.

Sources said the water situation will worsen in the coming months because of the hot weather .